Lone, alpine and traveling wolves look for the Iberian wolf, preferably among Catalan mountains.
Reason?
stable relationship, start a family and, in the process, perpetuate more than a century later the first saga of the mythical species in the community... The wolf, perhaps the species that arouses the most passions and fears in equal measure, needs the first wolf cub born in Catalonia to have an official protection plan developed by the Generalitat.
After being exterminated with shotguns at the beginning of the last century, two decades ago the arrival of the first solitary male specimens that crossed from France to the Catalan Pyrenees began to be documented.
Since then there has been no record of any wolf births in the community.
But the Government and the environmental sector now believe that this environmental milestone could occur at any time.
Especially after last September it was documented that a male of Alpine origin (
Canis lupus italicus
) and a female born in Spain (
Canis lupus signatus
) had formed the only pair of Iberian-Italian wolves known in Lower Aragon, in the area of Alcañiz, Hijar and Caspe, a few kilometers from Catalonia.
“The day we find a small excrement of a specimen, we celebrate it as a treasure!”, says enthusiastically via videoconference Gabriel Lampreave, 56 years old and head of the wolf monitoring team of the Rural Agents of the Generalitat. .
After a lifetime linked to the observation and protection of the species ("I remember at 20 years old taking my car, crossing the Peninsula to observe wolves in Sierra Culebra, Zamora"), Lampreave is excited just to think that a saga of wolves born in Catalonia settles, although it is cautious.
"Depending on their monitoring, settlement may or may not occur, the twenty specimens that we have followed since 2000 stay here for a while, they wait to see if they find others, and if not, they leave..." Explain.
A few weeks after the news of the pair of wolves from Aragon broke, the Department of Climate Action of the Generalitat was eager to announce that it had formed a working group on the canid with representatives of the livestock, environmental and forestry sectors to improve the relationship between the wolf and the localities where conflicts may arise with ranchers, fearful of possible damage.
Individuals of this species are very sociable - they organize themselves in packs - but, as is also the case with humans, during their youth they need a few years of dispersal in solitude, before settling down or forming a family.
Like a European student, the wolf seems to have arrived in Catalonia from Erasmus: last Monday French, German and Spanish laboratories confirmed the longest journey that an individual of this species has made, 1,200 kilometers from Germany to Lleida.
Since the beginning of 2000, the Government has detected around twenty specimens arriving from the Italian and French Alps scattered throughout different parts of the Catalan Pyrenees and pre-Pyrenees.
They smell each other but they don't end up finding each other.
Wolves, like rivers, already existed before humans divided the planet between administrations.
They cross borders without passports for thousands of kilometers, negotiate deadly roads and on too many occasions dodge bullets.
They don't know it, but digging a burrow and filling it with wolves on one side or another of the mountain can completely change their legal status and facilitate their protection.
Under pressure from the livestock sector, in 2020 the Catalan Administration lowered its status in the draft catalog of threatened species.
Although it was included as a threatened species, it was now considered “extinct breeding” and not “in danger of extinction.”
In practice, this category of protection does not require the Generalitat to develop a protection plan until the species breeds.
Then, the Generalitat will be obliged to approve a plan in a period of three years, sources from the Generalitat clarify.
This would translate into more economic resources and greater monitoring of the animal.
The Generalitat, as the then director of Fauna and Flora of the Generalitat, Ricard Casanova, admitted to this newspaper in 2020, has been trying to find a middle ground for years.
”May everyone be happy.
Let there be a wolf but it does not generate fear...”, Casanova explained in reference to the livestock sector.
Ignasí Castellví, president of the pro-wolf association Signatus, summarizes it like this: “It is a passive attitude, 'we will not prevent it from settling but we will not do anything to make it stay,' he says.
Regions of France, Soria and the Basque Country have already become meeting points for European wolves of diverse origins.
While the first couple, formed by an Iberian female and a male, walks through Aragon, in Catalonia the wolves detected are overwhelmingly males who are passing through: “They spend some time in the Catalan mountains but then leave in search of other packs. ", adds Lampreave, a passionate tracker who uses his dog
Taca
's sense of smell in search of any evidence.
But its function is not only to find, but also to reduce tensions between livestock communities and prepare the ground when Catalonia once again becomes a land of wolves.
In 2023, only one damage caused by the wolf was confirmed, in Moianès.
Lampreave is the first to arrive after any warning: “We have been on the side of the sector since day one, our work does not end when we verify that there are wolves.
For example, for a few weeks we have been helping them search for lost cattle.
The issue of damages in this sense requires a lot of administrative and social empathy.
Each exploitation is a world, each case is a world.
There is no single solution.
"We have to act in the most efficient way but it is everyone's job."
The Administration has an aid item to compensate for attacks by bears and wolves on livestock, and in parallel it also subsidizes the arrival of mastiffs to protect the livestock.
The Unió de Pagesos union: “They attack the cattle”
The working group announced by the Government to prepare the settlement of the wolf is also made up of representatives of the majority union of Unió de Pagesos, concerned about the increase in the presence of the wolf near extensive farms: “In the Autonomous Communities where the packs are settled, the wolves have attacked the livestock.
When they live with the bear, the ranchers tell us 'laugh at the bear if there is a wolf',” explains Raquel Serrat, head of Rural Environment and Mountain Policies at the Unió de Pagesos.
“Repairing the damage has to be the last resort, what we demand is real and effective management to ensure the viability of an essential economic activity in Catalonia, such as livestock farming,” says Serrat.
Lampreave adds: "We must all collaborate to end the discourse of fear about wolves, and Rural Agents will continue to accompany livestock farmers so that they see that canids are not a threat."
The arrival of the German wolf in Lleida does not imply that the species will settle in a short time, but it is an indication of the increase and constancy of migratory flows.
“The more individuals that arrive, the more likely they are to settle,” says Lampreave.
This rural agent, a wolf tracker by trade and vocation, trusts that one day canine enthusiasts will stop having to cross the Peninsula to go in search of those eyes, those deep yellow eyes, a paradigm of the wildest and most elusive in the forest.
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